"Are they really going to CES? I thought they would
have gone up in flames by now."

In 1992 I attended my first audio
show, the erstwhile Stereophile Show in Los Angeles.
Nursing a freshly broken toe, I hobbled from room to
room and indulged in audio systems I'd only read and
fantasized about up to that time. (I used to play a
game where I imagined what certain
components, especially loudspeakers, sounded like
after I read the reviews—I've recently met other
young audiophiles who still engage in that rather
frustrating pastime.)

I landed in one particular room with
Gryphon amplification and Enigma Acoustique speakers
and let the gentleman who was demonstrating the
system work his sales magic. He answered all my
questions and played all my discs and all I could
think of was how much I wanted his job. He was
surrounded by great gear and great music and he got
paid to do it. I wanted this gig.

Twenty years later, I have it. I'm
not going to lie and tell you how hard it is and how
I really had no idea what I was getting into when I
signed on the dotted line. To be succinct, it's the
best job I've ever had and now I finally understand
what Abraham Maslow means by self-actualization. As
the US distributor of Unison Research and Opera
Loudspeakers along with Colleen Cardas, I get to
hear great gear in my home nearly every day. When
the new stuff comes out, I get to "test it out."
After several years of reviewing equipment, I have
to admit that this is much more fun.

But as you can see from the quote
above, which was uttered by someone I consider a
friendly competitor (we're even Facebook friends
with him, so he must know on some level that Colleen
and I are doing well), there is a dark side to the
commercial of high-end audio. That shouldn't come as
a surprise to anyone familiar with the
industry—especially to someone like me who spent way
too many years flaming away on audio discussion
groups on the Internet—but shit happens. Despite an
overall and unifying spirit in high-end audio that
can be encapsulated in the phrase "Times are tough
and we all need to stick together to survive," a
certain desperate ugliness occasionally rears its
dour and battle-scarred head.

This is especially true with the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As you've
probably heard, CES is all about business and not at
all about products or music or superior production.
I know this is a gross generalization, but if you've
spent a lot of time at more consumer-friendly shows
such as the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest you'll know
that this is the general vibe at CES, and everyone
who needs to stay in business for another year can
feel the incredible stress. While this is partially
due to the fact that the general public is not
allowed into CES—although as an amateur I was always
able to find a way in—what you see at the Venetian
are the deals being made, not the gear being
evaluated. Manufacturers make deals with
distributors, distributors make deals with dealers,
and the entire time journalists are trying to
squeeze in and take pictures and hopefully get
something sent to them for review.

As a former audio journalist, I do
have a special place in my heart for the scribes. At
CES, they feel the pressure as well, so much so that
the reviewers who represent larger publications are
assigned a market sector which truly limits their
ability to see and hear what they want. For example,
I watched several journalists walk into my room and
immediately ask the retail price of my speakers or
my amps. When I told them, they reluctantly exited
while muttering something like, "Sorry, I'm only
supposed to cover floorstanding loudspeakers that
retail between $3850 and $4150 per pair." One poor
soul seemed especially stymied by the fact we were
demonstrating a hybrid integrated amplifier—he was
only supposed to cover solid state amplification and
his nearby colleague was only supposed to cover
tubed amplification. After I convinced him that
someone had to step up and take responsibility
for our unique product category, he reluctantly sat
down and took notes, all the time wondering if his
editor was going to reject his efforts because he
didn't conform to his narrow assignment.

Yup, CES is pretty serious stuff. Yet
for some reason I absolutely loved the show this
year. Sure, a lot of it had to do with it being my
first year as an exhibitor (and my third show
overall). While the percentage of visitors to my
room who actually sat down and listen to my system
was comparatively small next to AXPONA or RMAF, I
still had a lot of face time with some truly
interesting people in our industry. Best of all,
some of them came bearing cigars. While I brought
some exquisite examples from Illusione, Gurkha,
Litto Gomez, Warlock and Cabaiguan, I still managed
to reinforce my stock through the contributions of
wonderful people such as George Cardas and PJ
Zornosa. Someone else quietly left a huge cigar next
to my belongings in the bathroom of our room; it had
a Straightwire band on it and actually tasted quite
good. Thanks, whoever you are! I can almost hear
everyone in their conference rooms discussing their
Colleen Cardas Imports strategies and saying, "Just
hook that Phillips guy up with a Cohiba Behike and
he'll be putty in your hands." They'd be right.

While the show was extremely
successful for CCI—we added a few dealers and were
presented several opportunities to expand our
business—we had our share of challenges. When I was
a project manager for a telecommunications company,
we used to say, "Our job isn't to lay cable, it's to
eliminate the friggin' obstacles." Same goes for CCI
and CES; the setting up and showing of hi-fi gear is
the easy part. Important promotional materials for
our room partner, Audience AV, arrived on our front
porch on the day we left—and we had exited through
the back alley and never saw them. We had to ask one
of our neighbors to FedEx everything and it cost a
fortune. I also managed to create a product listing
that mixed up the retail price of our premier CD
player with the dealer price, effectively giving
everyone the audio bargain of the century. Finally,
we had to contend with the fact that our Ford
Expedition was filled to the gills with equipment,
promotional materials and luggage, and we still had
to pick up our manufacturer at the airport. I hope
he didn't mind the quick trip from McCarran to the
Venetian strapped to the luggage rack on the roof of
our Expedition.

The successes, however, greatly
outweighed the missteps. Our fondest memories will
be the time we spent with our manufacturer
Bartolomeo Nasta of Unison. Colleen and I always
make it a point to provide Bart with unique glimpses
of American culture. At the AXPONA show in NYC last
June, we took him to Grey's Papaya and Papaya King
and let him decide which hot dog was the best. It
was the first hot dog he had ever tasted, and he
loved it. At CES, we turned him onto In-N-Out
Burgers, another first. "It's much fresher than
McDonald's!" he exclaimed after his experienced
Italian palate met with its first Double Double.
Finally, I showed him the infamous "Dick in a Box"
video from Lonely Island, and for the rest of the
show he was humming the tune to himself and
occasionally punctuating our conversations with the
chorus. If DIAB becomes a monster 2012 hit in Italy,
I take full credit.

Colleen and I drove back to Texas
with tired feet and a profound sense of elation. The
consensus was that we kicked ass. We talked about
correcting mistakes before CES 2013, and we started
choosing which equipment we wanted to show at the
Jacksonville AXPONA show in March. When we finally
drove past the dusty broken-down little towns in New
Mexico and West Texas and finally wandered into the
serene beauty of the Texas Hill Country, our home, I
thought about that 1992 Stereophile show and how far
I had come in just a few short decades. It's been a
hell of a ride. I love this job.

Marc Phillips is a
partner with Colleen Cardas at Colleen Cardas
Imports